1 INTRODUCTION

The COVID-19 pandemic has had devastating effects worldwide. In response, many individuals have made significant sacrifices. These sacrifices include those made by essential workers who risk infection in order to ensure that others can have access to adequate food, medical care, electricity, and other goods. Individuals are also asked to sacrifice through social distancing. Social distancing brings about a collective benefit, in the form of a reduced overall transmission rate of coronavirus. Yet it is also quite burdensome. Many workers have foregone earning incomes, businesses have ceased operating, and children have missed educational opportunities, to name just a few prominent costs. In response to the sacrifices people have borne during this pandemic, a natural question concerns what you, as an individual, can do to help. Our answer in this paper is that individuals who have not been significantly burdened by the collective response to the pandemic have an obligation to give to those who have—especially those who have been burdened due to background injustices. We focus on the American context in particular, although the arguments could be modified to apply to other contexts.

In Section 2, we consider two different rationales for donating to people who have borne especially significant hardships during the pandemic. While one approach would be to focus on duties of aid as a rationale for giving, we argue that a reciprocity-based approach is more sensitive to the ways in which people undertake burdens in order to produce a collective good. In Section 3, we defend the claim that compensation is owed to those who have been unfairly burdened in order to produce a collective benefit. In Section 4, we address who has been unfairly burdened. We endorse an anti-perversity condition: those who are worst-off because of background injustice have a stronger claim to compensation than, for example, wealthy investors who have seen a decline in the values of their portfolios. In Section 5, we argue that giving money to those who have borne unfair burdens in response to the COVID-19 pandemic can be understood as a way of addressing a predictable epistemic limitation on the part of the state. In Section 6, we consider an objection from those who claim that we should be giving money to those in most need around the world rather than locally.

中文翻译：

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大流行期间的互惠和给予的伦理

1 简介

COVID-19 大流行在全球范围内产生了毁灭性的影响。作为回应，许多人做出了重大牺牲。这些牺牲包括那些冒着感染风险的基本工人为了确保其他人能够获得足够的食物、医疗、电力和其他物品而做出的牺牲。个人还被要求通过社会疏远做出牺牲。社会疏离带来了集体利益，其形式是降低了冠状病毒的总体传播率。然而，它也相当繁重。许多工人失去了收入，企业停止运营，儿童错过了教育机会，仅举几例突出的成本。为了回应人们在这场大流行期间所做出的牺牲，一个自然的问题是，作为个人，您可以做些什么来提供帮助。我们在本文中的回答是，那些没有因集体应对大流行病而承受沉重负担的个人有义务为那些承受沉重负担的人——尤其是那些因背景不公正而承受沉重负担的人。我们特别关注美国的背景，尽管可以修改这些论点以适用于其他背景。

在第 2 节中，我们考虑了向在大流行期间遭受特别重大困难的人捐款的两种不同理由。虽然一种方法是将援助义务作为给予的理由，但我们认为，基于互惠的方法对人们为产生集体利益而承担负担的方式更为敏感。在第 3 节中，我们为那些为了产生集体利益而受到不公平负担的人提供补偿的主张进行辩护。在第 4 节中，我们讨论了谁受到了不公平的负担。我们支持一种反倒错条件：那些因背景不公正而处境最差的人比那些看到其投资组合价值下降的富有投资者更有权要求赔偿。在第 5 节中，我们认为，向那些为应对 COVID-19 大流行而承担不公平负担的人提供资金可以理解为解决国家方面可预测的认知限制的一种方式。在第 6 节中，我们考虑了那些声称我们应该向世界各地而不是当地最需要的人提供资金的反对意见。